A 5,000 Spanish Word Vocabulary in 100 days
Update 2.2.2017: I decided the group method wasn’t the right approach. But it did lead me to what I do think is the right approach. So as of this moment, I’m in Cali working away at this as a part of 4 challenges during my time in Cali. Come join me to see how this plays out: The Cali Game.
The short story
To take a good shot at learning 5,000 words in 100 days, I need to find:
- 6 people who want to improve their spanish vocabulary enjoyably, quickly, and efficiently
- each willing to make 10 flashcards on average per day for 10 weeks
- and willing to meet twice per week for 1–1.5 hours on a google hangout to review the new cards and make ridiculous and memorable shared stories about each of the cards.
Vocabulary is of course just one part of learning a language. But by the end of this, we’ll all have a solid foundation in grammar and pronunciation as a part of this as well.
Further explanation below.
Want to learn the top 5,000 most useful words in Spanish?
I need to…
and within the next 100 days.
On December 27th (approximately 100 days from now), I’m headed to Cali, Colombia to shoot a pilot episode for a tv series where we’ll be exploring cities through dance. And I want to be able to speak with people in their native language.
And I think it’s possible with the right strategy and a motivated team…..
What 5,000 words will get you
To understand 80% of what you’d likely encounter in the spoken Spanish language, you need to understand around 2,000 words.
That’s really good if your aim is to just survive and get around town and have some fun. Not very good if you want to be an interesting conversationalist or record an interview with the mayor or be able to talk about ideas and feelings and some of the most important things.
However 5,000 carefully chosen words covers 90%+ of any of the words you’ll likely encounter in spoken language. Along with context and some reviews of vocabulary tailored to a specific topic you’re likely going to talk about, my guess is this is sufficient for being able to feign near-native fluency (assuming you’re also working on your pronunciation and grammar.)
How long does it take to learn 1 word?
The most efficient way to learn a word is basically to make “Anki” flash cards (following a few basic rules to aid memorability–I’ll show you shortly).
Anki is a software tool for flash cards based on the idea of spaced repetition. What it tries to do is show you a card just as you’re about to forget it it. And the more times you get the flashcard right, the less frequently it will show it to you. You’ll see it tomorrow, then next week, then next month, then in 3 months, and eventually it just goes into your longterm memory where you’ll remember it forever.
I have some tools and templates for making really good Anki cards, I also have a list of the 5,000 most frequent words in Spanish. Based on my initial experiments it takes 2–4 minutes to make the necessary cards for one word (although I expect one could get much better at it after a few dozen cards).
5,000 * 4 minutes = 333 hours of card making
That’s more time than you or I have between now and December 27th for making flashcards. Plus we need to have some time to study them.
Why not just download some cards that have already been made?
The reason is the act of making the card is an extremely useful experience for learning what the word means. You go find a picture, you select a sentence, you listen to the pronunciation, you make up a sentence that connects the word to your existing memories. Making the card is more than half the battle.
Hoping that this wasn’t necessarily true, I tried downloading some pre-made flashcards, and I found it ……extremely un-useful and boring.
So this leaves one option: make flashcards as a group and create a shared unique experience around each card.
The proposed protocol
First, I’ll show you what the basic process for making these flash cards looks like:
So here’s the protocol:
- We’ll have a kick-off Google Hangout to divide the top 5,000 “most useful” words between us (we’ll be using this frequency dictionary: Frequency Dictionary by Mark Davies.) We’ll do this hangout sometime during the week commencing Sunday September 19, 2016 depending on our schedules.
- You agree to make 10 cards per day for the next 10 weeks following the process above. Once you get good at it, my guess is this will probably be less than 30 minutes per day.
- During the kick-off hangout, we’ll schedule two times to meet per week for 1–1.5 hours to review the new cards we made on Google Hangouts.
- During the reviews, you’ll tell your one sentence story, and the rest of us will quickly expound upon it to turn it into a memorable scene of all our making.
We’ll all have access to each other’s flashcard decks through Anki, so we can review them individually at our leisure until we get them into our longterm memories. (I find using the Anki app on my phone for reviewing cards really easy and enjoyable.)
With 6 people plus myself making 10 flashcards per day for 10 weeks, we’ll have Anki cards for 5,000 words that we each have a personal connection to, which is a crucial detail.
I think it’ll also be a lot of fun.
Email me at kevin@foundation.city if you’d like to join or if you have any questions. We’ll be getting started within the next week.
kevin